Hemisphere GamesGames for both sides of your brain2015-03-03T00:45:32Zhttp://www.hemispheregames.com/feed/atom/WordPresseddyboxhttp://www.hemispheregames.comhttp://www.hemispheregames.com/?p=44682015-03-03T00:45:32Z2015-02-10T17:50:43ZWe plan on running a Kickstarter campaign this Spring for a game in development. We also live in Canada. That means our pledge prices will all be listed in CAD (Canadian Dollars) rather than USD. Creators in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand are similarly bound to their country’s currencies.

Let’s face it: the majority of backers for tabletopgames, video games*, and most other categories live in the USA. I also believe Americans experience a psychological barrier to backing a project in a foreign currency. (Jamey Stegmaier discusses this in his post on running a non-US-based Kickstarter campaign.) How big a factor is this? It’s hard to tell. But I believe it’s significant.

But why be bound? Perhaps Kickstarter could add the option to list your project in whatever currency you choose. I don’t mind receiving the funds at the end of the campaign in USD or my local currency – whatever works for Kickstarter; but since they’re doing currency conversions under the hood anyways, why not give us the option? In this age of digital distribution and projects with physical goods that ship directly from a manufacturer, does the currency of the creator’s country of origin really matter?

I wrote to Kickstarter support a few months ago, requesting the feature. I got a nice response.

“While this isn’t an available feature at the moment, we are always looking for ways to improve the backer experience. Your suggestions and feedback are really helpful as we move forward and make enhancements. I’ll pass along your suggestions to the team!”

Cool, but no news since then, so I tried writing again a few days ago and got this response.

It is still not possible to choose in which currency your project’s funding goal will be displayed. Although there is no set timeline for this feature, keep an eye on our blog for any future changes.

Encouraging, but no commitment or timeline.

I got to wondering, how many non-US creators would like to see Kickstarter add this feature? Perhaps we can work together and request Kickstarter to make this change. If we all wrote to Kickstarter support, I’m pretty sure they’d take the request more seriously. (I know that when we hear a common request from our players, it moves up our priority list and is a lot more likely to get implemented soon.)

So, if you’d like to see Kickstarter implement this, mail them at support@kickstarter.com, asking them to do so. Feel free to independently describe the feature you’d like to see, or link back to this post – whatever you prefer.

Thanks! And please comment below if you do write to Kickstarter. It’d be great to know how many people have made the request!

*I couldn’t find a concrete statistic to back this up, but I’d be shocked if it wasn’t true.

]]>6eddyboxhttp://www.hemispheregames.comhttp://www.hemispheregames.com/?p=44352015-02-02T19:03:08Z2015-02-02T19:03:08ZDave and I are relatively old hands in the videogame industry. Between AAA and indie projects we’ve each been at it for over 10 years. But, aside from some hobbyist design, neither of us knew much about the tabletop game industry until we got serious about publishing Karmaka.

Over the last 6 months we’ve done a lot of reading on the subject (surprise, surprise, there’s a ton of info on the web about it), and we thought we’d share our best finds here – the kind of resources we wished we had known about from the start. Most of our fellow videogame developers are in the same boat, and we thought this kind of thing might be useful for those looking to make the same leap. (Many tabletop developers are probably already familiar with these.)

Jamey Stegmaier’s blog, which focuses mainly on Kickstarter for boardgames, though there’s a spread of info about both KS and tabletop games in general. So much useful information there. I recommend reading pretty much every post (I did) if you’re considering running a KickStarter campaign. And if you’re like me, you’ve scratched your head wondering how to handle worldwide fulfillment/shipping from a manufacturer (possibly in China) to backers all over the world. If so, Jamey’s incredibly helpful guide and follow-up are essential reading.

There are plenty of blogs and sites out there that discuss tabletop game design. Interesting stuff, but since there’s a lot of overlap between that and videogame design, I’ll skip most of it and simply point to James Mathe’s overview where he presents a high-level introduction followed by links to tons of resources on the subject. (eg. Board Game Designers Forum, a great place to discuss tabletop design with other designers, and of course BoardGameGeek, which has not only the most complete board game database on the planet, but forums where you can discuss anything related to playing or creating board games.)

A great news feed I now follow is Cardboard Edison. I didn’t dig into the archives the way I did with James’s and Jamey’s blogs, but they’re a great way to stay on top of interesting news and resources as they appear.

I don’t tend to watch a lot of vidcasts, as most of them ramble too much for my tastes, but one great, new vidcast on the subject of creating and publishing a board game is The Forbidden Limb. Their casts are about 20 minutes apiece, and the density of useful information and advice they present is awesome.

Just like in the independent videogame scene, tabletop creators are amazingly supportive of each other and more than willing to share knowledge and advice. There’s so much more out there, but I think these are great, general starting points. (A huge thanks to their creators for all the time and effort they’ve put into creating them!) If you dig into these you’ll not only learn a ton, but find pointers to so many of the other amazing resources out there.

Are there any other “essential”, high-level resources that you think should be added to this list?

]]>2eddyboxhttp://www.hemispheregames.comhttp://www.hemispheregames.com/?p=43972015-01-31T08:08:36Z2015-01-27T17:05:53ZAt long last, we’re ready to announce a new game – one we’ve been working on for roughly a year now: Karmaka.

]]>4eddyboxhttp://www.hemispheregames.comhttp://www.hemispheregames.com/?p=43922015-01-20T00:05:51Z2015-01-20T00:04:13ZIt’s been quiet on this blog for a while, but that’s going to change soon, as we’re preparing to announce a new game!

More on that soon. For now I’ll just say it’s a card/board/tabletop game (yup, a real, physical game!), though we plan to release a digital version of it as well.

Anyways, you may have noticed our blog & website look quite different as of today. It’s pretty much a new site, but with all our old content migrated over. (The old site’s design and 2008 WordPress cruft weren’t conducive to adding a new game & content.) If you see anything wonky or broken, like missing images or broken links, please let us know. (Comment below or email us.)

Thanks, and more soon…

]]>1eddyboxhttp://www.hemispheregames.comhttp://www.hemispheregames.com/?p=40142015-01-15T23:29:51Z2013-11-04T18:11:11ZIt’s been three equinoxes since Osmos launched on Android. In that time, quite a few developers have asked us about our porting experience, probably due to the quality of the port as well as the game’s success on the platform. Our answer: we worked with Apportable. “How was that?” people ask. Our answer is, in a word, “Great!”

The tl;dr version of this post is:

Apportable’s platform allows you to “cross compile” your iOS project into a native Android app. (A .apk which you can publish to Google Play, etc.)

Yes, it works. It’s kind of crazy.

The folks at Apportable are brilliant, professional, and downright decent.

You can now try their service for free, and depending on your app’s features, you may never need to pay them a penny.

[Side note: Before I go on, I’d like to answer a question you may be asking yourself: “Why am I only writing this now, 1.5 years later?” Well, I actually wrote a glowing piece about Apportable back when Osmos first launched on Android, and they asked me not to publish it; they didn’t feel ready for an onslaught of developers wanting to use their platform. Fair enough, I thought.]

A lot has happened at Apportable in 1.5 years. When we first began working with them, their platform was far from mature. (Osmos was actually Apportable’s first release!) Their system worked, but it required Apportable engineers to be significantly involved in the porting process, along with shared code repositories and build servers. There were also many details that needed to be ironed out along the way, from language features that needed to be added, to niggly, device-specific issues that had to be resolved. Over time, however, their process has become smoother and smoother. And at this point they even have a “self-serve” option, allowing developers to download an SDK to try for themselves. In full disclosure I should say that we’ve had a unique and somewhat privileged relationship with Apportable, and I’ve only had an early taste of that SDK, so it’s hard for me to comment on the pure, self-serve experience. In any case, it looks like they’re finally ready for “the onslaught.”

So, given our experience, what can I comment on? Well, here are a few items:

Code reuseA big, obvious benefit is code reuse. With a few #ifdef statements here and there you can have a single codebase across iOS and Android. Apportable’s platform extracts settings from your Xcode project and cross-compiles all your Objective-C, C++, native API calls, etc. automagically. I never had to learn a thing about the Android NDK nor write a line of Java. I’m sure I don’t have to sing the praises of code reuse to developers, but here’s an example: When initially porting to Android, I did a chunk of work to make the game adapt to any screen resolution. (Things were originally hard-coded for iPads and iPhones. Not ideal, but that’s how it goes sometimes.) Later, when Apple increased the size of the iPhone screen from 3.5 to 4 inches, we had very little new work to do. If our Android work had been in Java, there would have been a lot of grunt work involved in bringing these changes back to iOS.

Fragmentation ignorance is bliss It’s well known: there are a ton of different Android devices and OS versions out there with varying capabilities and idiosyncrasies. As Apportable early adopters we felt some of this pain, one example being how some devices support certain pixel formats better than others (eg. RGB565 vs RGBA8888), but once the Apportable engineers had worked out these details we never had to worry about them again. Personally I’m quite happy to be ignorant on this front, leaving all the countless, ever-changing details of the Android ecosystem to Apportable’s engineers.

QualityI regularly see happy comments from players on the store about how well Osmos runs on their device in terms of stability, feature support, framerate, etc. as compared to other games. This is a testament to the technical strength of Apportable’s platform. Yes, people (thankfully!) like the game, but I believe our success on Android is also significantly due to how solidly it runs across so many devices.

MagicI’ll explain this one via example. Osmos is a procedural game; all levels are generated randomly based on patterns and statistical parameters describing the difficulty of a level. In Odyssey mode, however, each level is always the same, by virtue of the fact that we always choose the same initial (hand-curated) random seed. Unfortunately, the random number generators on iOS and Android are different, and so – at first – all our Odyssey levels looked different from their iOS counterparts. We thought: Oh well, it looks like we’ll have to pick new seeds for each level (27 of them) on Android so that the difficulty curve is more-or-less preserved. When we mentioned this to Apportable they returned with: Well, we can simply emulate the iOS random number generator for you so everything is transparently identical on Android. We smiled and said: Yes, please. Nice to work with people who really know what they’re doing.

Support!Before taking the plunge in 2011 we had significant concerns about porting to Android, fueled by articles like this one about the potentially large support burden it would entail. When Apportable offered to take on front-line support for the Android port, we jumped on it. This has worked out amazingly well. The volume of support email on Android is indeed way higher than on iOS (I’d say roughly 50x), and the fine folks who have handled support for us at Apportable have been nothing short of incredible: professional, friendly, prompt… their responses were often better than anything I could have mustered to be honest. So after an initial “monitoring” period – with a sweet sigh of relief – I stopped looking at them altogether, knowing that if anything required our attention they’d escalate it. Personally I find support email to be very distracting, “costing” much more than the typical minute or three it takes to reply, and so I don’t think I can quite express how wonderful I have found this. (In fact I wasn’t sure I should even mention this point about support, but I looked at Apportable’s pricing sheet, and indeed they still offer this to developers. It isn’t cheap, but I believe it to be worth every penny.)

Well, I hope this is useful to developers who are considering giving Apportable’s platform a try. Feel free to poke us with questions or comments below. It’d also be great to hear about other people’s experiences, especially if you’ve tried their new self-serve option, as we can’t offer much insight on that front.

While playing Osmos he had noticed an achievement we named “Atanarjuat”, earned for completing the game’s “Chase” stage. This was a nod and a reference to a wonderful Canadian film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, based on an ancient Inuit legend. (yup, we’re Canadian.) This one word sparked a vision in Ryan’s mind. From his first email to us…

… I started thinking how amazing it would be to have a handful of quality games translated into Inuktitut for kids in Nunavut to play in their own language. It can be difficult to feel like you have a role, or a potential future in the gaming industry when no one is speaking your language. I wanted to offer my services and get involved in helping to put together an Inuktitut language version of the game.

Ryan started a not-for-profit company called Pinnguaq (which means “Play” in Inuktitut), and has been developing an app that will teach people the basics of Inuktitut through song. He’s very passionate about these projects:

When you put something in people’s native language, you give them a more personal experience. It kind of makes the world seem a little bit smaller.

While we had previously translated the PC versions of Osmos into German, French, Spanish and Italian, at that point the iOS version was only available in English. We were looking into localizing it, but this was the “kick in the pants” we needed to make it happen. How could we say no?

So we started the technical work, and Ryan organized a crowd-sourced translation project. He put together a “quiz”, inviting Inuktitut speakers to submit suggestions online on how to adapt phrases used in the game. Apparently it was a challenge to translate many of the words in Osmos to Inuktitut (“Antimatter” for instance!), especially in such a way that they’d make sense across the territory. Ryan worked with Tommy Akulukjuk, who provided a full “baseline” translation; but they hoped to receive many different suggestions for proper terminology in order to understand how each dialect may translate a specific term or word, and how it would be pronounced and used universally. They even consulted with elders in the community to verify that the words and phrases chosen would indeed work well in all dialects.

Elders…

I must admit that as I sit in my less-than-exotic home office writing this, I wish I could have been a fly on the wall in that scene, watching these Nunavut elders gathered around Osmos, weighing the words and phrases chosen to represent their language and culture in the Osmos blobiverse.

Well — that spark in Ryan’s eye is now a reality. We just released Osmos 2.3 for iOS (more details here) with multi-language support, including… Inuktitut!

Enjoy and ᐃᓅᓯᖃᑦᓯᐊᖅ!

]]>6eddyboxhttp://www.hemispheregames.comhttp://www.hemispheregames.com/?p=39812013-06-20T02:11:43Z2013-06-20T02:11:43ZHey everyone, just a quick post about our latest iOS Osmos update. The main additions are:

Multi-language support
You can now play Osmos in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and… Inuktitut! The story behind the Inuktitut translation is an interesting one actually. Big thanks to Nicolas Simon (a Master’s student in translation studies at the University of Brest, France) for the French translation, and the folks at U-TRAX for the other 6 languages. Note: Osmos will “auto-detect” your device’s language, though you can manually select language via Osmos’s settings menu.

4 New Achievements
One in single-player (“There can be only one!”), and 3 in multiplayer (2 new ranks, and one for participating in a tie game).

This is a free update, and includes 6 distinct arenas in which players can play against each other — both locally and online — in a mote-eat-mote absorption-fest of skill and strategy. This update also includes many audio/visual improvements.

Local play is supported over Wi-fi, and online multiplayer is supported via Google Play’s new Game Services! (Osmos launched simultaneously with Google’s announcement a couple days ago, so no one can accuse us of twiddling our thumbs! ;-)) Players can share their achievements with their Google+ circles via this service as well.

18 new multiplayer achievements. (Along with a new single-player achievement.)

Optional handicap system to keep competition friendly. Be kind to young motes.

So what are you waiting for? Go show your friends who’s boss of the Blobiverse! We sincerely hope you enjoy it!

Many thanks to the fine folks at Apportable who did most of the “heavy lifting” in bringing multiplayer to Android. We couldn’t have done it without you! <3

]]>15eddyboxhttp://www.hemispheregames.comhttp://www.hemispheregames.com/?p=39102013-01-17T21:53:46Z2013-01-17T21:53:46ZHey everyone, we’ve released Osmos version 2.2 on iOS! Here are the details:(note: for those of you on other platforms, you can see what we’re up to here.)

iPhone 5 support
Osmos now takes full advantage of the iPhone/iPod 5’s bigger screen! More motes, more zen.

Game progress saved in iCloud
Do you play Osmos on multiple devices, or have you migrated to a new phone or tablet? Well, your progress is now seamlessly propagated from device to device via the magic of the cloud! (Note: if you have a device with progress you want to propagate, you need to run Osmos 2.2 on it at least once to get that progress into the cloud.)

iPad – iPhone interplay
iPad players can now send Game Center invitations to iPhone players, and vice versa. We’ve also merged achievements and progress across the two versions.

iOS 6 support + Facebook integration
You can now give a multiplayer shout-out on your Facebook wall in addition to the existing Tweet button. We’ve added some other secret voodoo iOS 6 support under the hood as well.

Steps towards multiplayer rankings
This is another “under the hood” feature. Nothing to show yet, but we’re now gathering all multiplayer session data on our server, which will allow us to authenticate tournament games, rank players in a more interesting fashion, etc. More to come on this topic in the future…

(Oh, and we’d greatly appreciate if you “refreshed” your review on the App Store. Reviews reset on every update, and we work hard on these things! :))

Thanks and happy Osmoting!

]]>2eddyboxhttp://www.hemispheregames.comhttp://www.hemispheregames.com/?p=38602012-11-05T21:25:24Z2012-11-05T21:25:24Z[Note: if all you want is to play some hardcore Osmos multiplayer games, feel free to skip this post and come straight to our new forum.]

We’ve put a lot of work into Osmos multiplayer – about 3 man-years across 4 people – and (modesty aside) we’re really proud of it. Technically, we feel it’s a super smooth, polished experience. It also provides a really unique type of competitive play – highly skill-based – that rewards strategy and quick thinking, but not necessarily quick tapping. Individual matches last anywhere from a few seconds to perhaps a minute, and the player who plans the most rewarding route while optimizing their taps/propulsion will emerge the victor. We rarely play single player levels anymore (beyond testing), but when the multiplayer mode became solid, we had a blast playing each other.

But, as in any skill-based, multiplayer game, it’s way more fun and exciting to play against someone at your level. In particular, expert vs. expert play is awesome to both play and watch. Unfortunately, those kinds of games are hard to come by.

High Level Play and iOS

Top Starcraft players earn six-figure incomes. Thousands of fighting-game players and fans gather each year in Las Vegas for EVO. More than 8 million people worldwide tuned in to watch the League of Legends finals two week ago. “E-sports” are big. But they haven’t really penetrated phone and tablet gaming. Infrastructure such as MLG exists for PC and consoles, but not iOS nor Android. At least not yet.

Don’t get me wrong; there are a significant number of solid multiplayer games on iOS, and that number is growing. But it seems like the platform, or the tastes of its players, lean more towards turn-based multiplayer games (eg. Words with Friends, Ascension, Gasketball) and casual play. And maybe that makes sense in terms of the platform’s culture and affordances; most players are generally looking for bite-size gameplay — stuff that fits between the cracks. After all, serious gaming happens at your high-performance rig, with your big monitor(s), custom controllers, and comfortable chair… right?

Another aspect which shapes a platform is its infrastructure — in this context: Game Center (GC). GC is great in that it brings a ton of gamers together in a single social system, and allows developers to easily connect them via auto-matching and friend-invitations. But it’s lacking in terms of powerful matchmaking and player ranking. (For instance, there’s no way to lower a player’s score on a GC leaderboard.) As such, all the multiplayer games that use it (and there are many, including Infinity Blade, Fruit Ninja, SpellTower, Super Stickman Golf, MetalStorm, etc. etc.) are limited to “casual” play as well, in that expert players have a hard time finding each other.

There are exceptions. Some developers have built their own infrastructure: servers to host games, rank players, and provide ladder matchmaking. Such games include Street Fighter Volt, Outwitters, Battle Nations, and Magic the Gathering. One company in particular jumps out: Gameloft, who have created a cross-platform backend called Gameloft LIVE, and who seem to be going for the hardcore multiplayer market with games like Starfront Collision (StarCraft clone), Modern Combat (Call of Duty clone), N.O.V.A. (Halo clone), and many more. An interesting note is that a number of these games are getting targeted by hackers and cheaters, similar to what happens on PC. So is Game Center for that matter.

One more exception is of special interest to us: Galcon. This “minimalist” RTS has supported cross-platform (including iOS), ranked, secure online play for years now. (ie. without Game Center.) There’s even infrastructure and a community engaged in tournament play. What blows our minds is it was all developed by one man: Phil Hassey. Inspirational stuff.

Abs0rbed!

Well, we don’t plan on building hack-proof tournament servers anytime soon, but we would like to spark some expert Osmos play and see what happens. How can we do this? Well, as a first step, we’d simply like to see who’s out there, and discover what high-level play actually looks like! We like to think we’re good at the game, but it would be a real eye-opener to have our asses handed to us.

So if you’re interested in playing some expert-level Osmos, come on over to the new forum we setup, where we’ll be chatting, arranging some informal (at least to begin with) “tournaments”, and brainstorming the future of Osmos Pro play!